Ties that Bind
by Talia of Eragon
Summary: D returns to an old castle complex to strengthen the wards of an imprisoned vampire. The encounter causes him to reflect on certain events of his past. [HellsingVHD crossover.]


_**Disclaimer:**__ I do not own any part of Vampire Hunter D or Hellsing. I just like borrowing the characters to do my bidding _

_**Author's Notes:** Thank you for reading! Please review! If you would like to contact me, you can do so at I am planning to make a doujinshi of all or part of this story, which will be posted on my Deviant Art account (http://theprophettalia. I want to say a special thank you to Cathy Krusberg for beta reading this story for me._

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**Ties that Bind**

He drove the cyborg horse along an old beaten path toward the northeast. It was dark and cold and rainy, just as it always had been. Some things just didn't change. He pulled the wide-brimmed hat further down his forehead to combat the wind as it sprayed a particularly icy splatter of rain into his face.

"Um...D…" the voice of the symbiot called from beneath his gloved hand on the horse's reins, "Are we going where I think we're going?"

D paused before answering, "Yes."

"Do we have to? I mean…he hasn't moved from that damn room for at least 300 years, why do we have to go back…" it whined, and continued in a small annoyed voice, "You know he freaks me out…"

"Because I need to check the wards holding him there. You know this."

"But… he hasn't moved for at least three centuries… he hasn't left that complex for even longer…"

"Are you really that scared of him?"

The symbiot snorted, "I'd be a fool not to be. He's psycho and you know it."

"All the more reason to check the restraints."

"Fine—but if he finally snaps and kills you don't say I didn't warn you… Sometimes I wish I could just walk off of your palm you stubborn ass."

The corner of D's mouth curled slightly. The symbiot never changed either. Every time he returned to the complex it ranted. It had been over a century since the last time he'd set foot in it. Melancholy started to set in on him. Of course, melancholy was nothing new to him, it was how he lived his life, alone and miserable—but this trip always weighed especially heavy on him. The memories ate at him and tried his sanity, and the monster he was about to visit only made the situation worse.

……….

It was a three-day journey before he was close to the destination. The beaten country path had turned into a ruined concrete and brick road, partially eroded away and buried after centuries without repair. Half-destroyed buildings still stood from the human wars that had first allowed the vampires to return and overrun the planet.

Soon he saw it. The complex stood above the ruins in eerie perfection. D guided his horse to the front gate and halted it beside a bent metal light post. He dismounted and tied the horse before walking up the front steps. As he neared the front doors, his skin prickled as he came in contact with the vampire's aura. That was all that kept this building standing and the fibrous material from decaying like everything else around it.

D swept into the main hallway, walking slowly past the old artifacts that stood about in decoration of a world long gone. He could feel eyes watching him from the shadows of the corridor as he made his way to the main staircase. So, he's aware of my presence. Will he acknowledge me this time? D thought to himself as he continued.

He reached the third floor of the complex and went straight to the tall, ornate doors that marked the room he would find the vampire in. He was always there. He never moved.

D placed his gloved hands on the doors and pushed them open, entering the dark office space. He saw the vampire's feet first, propped up on a desk, and as his eyes focused he saw the leather-clad figure reclined slightly in the high-backed chair behind the desk. The vampire showed no signs of consciousness. D walked into the room and stood before the desk, studying the figure. Had he not known better, he would have thought the vampire a corpse, sitting as still as a statue. Thick layers of dust lay on his clothes and hair. It had been years since the vampire had moved. He sat with his hands folded together on his midsection, head bowed and long black hair curtaining his features.

D walked around the desk to stand directly beside the figure. He gazed down at the folded hands, a silver cross resting between the thumbs and forefingers. Dust lay on the backs of the gloves, but the wards—the circle insignias—that held the vampire's power back were still visible. D held his own hand out over the figure's folded hands and murmured the incantations to reinforce the wards. The insignias came alive with red light for a brief second, banishing the dust from the gloves before they returned to their previous dormant state.

There were other wards throughout the complex that he would have to strengthen, but those on the being's person were the most important. D stared at the dusty figure, the melancholy he had felt at the beginning of the journey eating at the corners of his mind. Before he realized what he was doing, he had reached out with his right hand and started to brush the thick dust off the vampire's hair.

"Don't you know to leave sleeping dogs lie, boy?" the vampire's deep voice rumbled out of his throat, rough from years and years of silence. The vampire tilted his head to look at D, red coals peering up through the curtain of black, dust falling from him as he moved.

D said nothing, and just stared back into those old eyes. The vampire returned to its previous position, but kept his eyes open, staring forward. "I was beginning to think that you had forgotten about me," he said. "Another fifty years and perhaps I could have broken from these damnable shackles." His red eyes swiveled to look up at D again, lids heavy. "Are you successfully carrying out the old orders?"

D paused before answering. "Yes."

"I should expect so. There are no beings left on this planet that are of much consequence." A maniacal smile broke across the creature's face. "Perhaps you would rethink caging me here. If you set me free I would rid the world of the remaining garbage out there."

"And once that garbage was gone, then what would you do?" D replied.

A scowl crossed the vampire's face.

"With your power unchecked, you would surely lose the remainder of your mind. And then I would be forced to destroy you too…"

The vampire laughed, quietly at first before it magnified to a resounding boom. He brought his legs down off the desk and leaned forward, cackling in the chair. "And what do you know of my power, boy?" The vampire gathered his power to himself, summoning darkness to the room. His body became a mass of black shadows, tentacles of power reaching outward, snaking around D's legs and arms. The vampire's form morphed, a large dog-like head erupting from his shoulder; it flew outward toward D.

In a flash D had drawn his sword and sliced through the hellhound's head, the power dissipating. D held the blade at the vampire's throat, forcing him to lean back into the chair again. The vampire continued to laugh. "Don't be foolish, boy." His smile widened impossibly, his eyes becoming wide and wild. He leaned into the razor-sharp blade, allowing it to pierce his throat. Dark blood spilled over his leather-bound chest. "Have you forgotten the first lesson I ever taught you?" He glared up at D, baring his fangs. "Although I am glad to see that you have become no one's _dog_, you are still half _monster_, and it has always been humans who kill monsters." He pressed against the blade until it struck bone. "And I fear there are no more humans in this world capable of destroying me." He moved back, the blade escaping his flesh with a disgusting slurp as it escaped the vampire's flesh. As suddenly as they had come, the vampire's shadows thinned and his face returned to the saddened glare that it had been at his first sign of consciousness.

"No more humans, indeed," he whispered. "No more humans to destroy this monster…" The vampire had become introspective once more. D took this moment to sheathe his sword and watched as the vampire withdrew into himself again. He still held the silver cross in his right hand and rubbed over it with his thumb.

"Leave me," the vampire muttered. "Leave me to my memories and my solitude. There is nothing out there in that world that interests me anymore. Just leave me be."

D nodded. With the wards strengthened again, his job was done. He turned and walked back toward the doors.

"You do her proud."

D froze with his hands on the door handles.

"Continue to carry out the order. 'Search and Destroy.'"

He opened the doors to exit. "Goodbye, Father."

He walked through the doors without looking back but still heard as the No Life King's voice trickled out: "The Bird of Hermes is my name… Eating my wings to make me tame…"

……….

D stood on the other side of the doors for a long time listening to the silence of the compound. It pained him to see his father like that—a broken man clinging desperately to the last few shreds of his already questionable sanity.

D looked up to the large portrait that hung on the wall across from the tall, ornate doors. Ice blue eyes stared back at him through wire-rim glasses. The woman in the portrait was depicted sitting in the same chair where his father currently sat in the room behind him. She was clad in an olive green suit, her pale blonde hair falling over her shoulders. A blue tie was fit snuggly around her neck, a silver cross pinned to the knot. Her posture, as well as her expression, was stern. She sat with her legs crossed, hands resting on her knee, a lit cigar clutched in the fingers of her right hand.

A small sad smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. He could still smell those damned cigars, even after all this time. He looked at the silver nameplate.

Sir Integral Fairbrook Wingates Hellsing—his long-departed mother, and the last human to walk the Earth with the power to control his father.

It amazed him that he could remember those first twenty years of his life as clearly as he did. He could see their subtle battles for power in the back of his mind. The constant game the two had played, Integral the master of the monster, and the monster who was never really under any true control. Those years were emblazoned in his memory more clearly than any of the following millennia that melted together like so much mud. Those years were a speck on the timeline of his life, but they were clear as though they had happened but minutes ago, especially in this place, this haunted memorial of a millennium long past.

His father kept the building and everything inside from decaying, even as his consciousness waxed and waned. He had reformed everything with his shadows thousands of years ago and held it in place with an invisible supernatural mold.

D had seen this happen to many vampires over the centuries, but his father had been the very first he had seen. Their immortality made vampires indifferent and cruel to the mortal world, but every now and then, an immortal would be touched by humanity in a way that they could not escape. Such beings inevitably suffered one of two fates: either they turned their partner—with or without their permission—and took them as a mate, or the human's mortality caught up to them and they perished. At the loss of their human mate, many immortals would fall into a deep depression, lasting anywhere from years to centuries. They would withdraw into themselves and attempt to stop time at the point when their partner lived, sometimes trying to replace their mate with duplicate copies. Many immortals in this position eventually came out of it. Others never did.

As many of these instances as D had seen, his father was by far the worst. The No Life King had not left the complex for over five millennia. He hadn't moved from the desk for 300 years. In fact, the brief conversation he had had that day was his first interaction with the vampire in nearly the same amount of time.

Integral had died in the first half of the twenty-first century, during the first of the many wars that had decimated the planet and allowed the vampires—the FREAKS, as they had called them back then—to take control. At her death his father had broken. D could still remember that day. The Hellsing Organization had been destroyed for the second time in thirty years. The building lay in ruin, the bodies of the dead and dying littering the ground.

Integral, barely into her forties, lay on the ground bleeding profusely from dozens of shrapnel wounds peppering her torso. D stood back watching the scene in horror, bleeding from his own wounds. His father—Alucard as he was called at that time—bent over Integral, fury painted across his face as her lifeblood spilled out over the ground.

Alucard tore a gash into his own wrist and held it over her paling lips. When the first few droplets had touched her, she turned her head and spat.

"Damn you, woman!" Alucard hissed. "Take my blood before it's too late."

She turned her stern gaze back to him, a gurgling cough sending a spray of her blood into the air. "Do not presume to give me orders, servant," she bubbled out. "I will never give in to a vampire."

Alucard's face contorted in a palpable mixture of anger and anguish. "Why must you be so stubborn? Swallow your pride and come to me…" Dark blood tears had begun to stand in his eyes.

"You will never be my master, Alucard."

"Integra…" he growled, a line of red streaking down his face. Integral lifted her hand with the last of her strength and smeared the blood tear on her monster's face.

"Have you forgotten, Alucard?" she had smiled weakly. "Monsters don't cry."

Alucard's jaws clenched, and he bit out through his teeth, "Your orders, my Master?"

"The same as always, my pet. Search and destroy…"

Those had been her last words. Seconds later her hand dropped to her side and the ice blue of her eyes had faded to a dull gray, that rare small smile frozen on her lips.

D had seen the true horror that was his father that day. Upon Integral's last breath, the wards that held him withered and his rage allowed him to break free entirely.

That first war that had claimed Integral's life was ended within a month as the No Life King swept both enemy and ally alike, laying waste to already war-torn Europe with his shadows and hellhound familiars. Once his bloodlust had subsided, it was all D could do at that tender age of 15 to contain him, reworking the wards that his ancestors had originally used to subdue his father. There was only one reason he succeeded in stopping Alucard back then. It was the same reason he did not fear for his own safety in his presence now. There was simply too much of Integral in him, in his appearance and demeanor, and the No Life King had always been helpless against the will of his mate.

D had sealed his father over the ruins of the Hellsing Organization's rubble where the original wards still held some power. Within the first several days of his containment, Alucard had used the shreds of his power allowed to him to reform the debris. D had interacted with him at first, attempting to soothe his madness, but it was no use. Seras, the other "pet vampire" of the Hellsing Organization, had tried as well, but Alucard had been inconsolable. He had been restless and violent at first, often searching for Integral throughout the walls of his prison, as if forgetting what had happened altogether. Eventually he took to brooding in the recreation of Integral's office. He eventually drove Seras away, and when the wars broke out again, D had left him as well. He returned every few weeks to check on his father. And then every few months. And then every few years.

The wars turned nuclear. The planet was ravaged. Humanity suffered, and the FREAKS multiplied without check. There were not enough hunters, like himself, to stop them. The FREAKS eventually evolved into what the vampires of the present day were, but they were insects compared to his father, the last true monster left alive. D feared what would happen if his father ever freed himself—not for his own safety, but for the remnants of the world. He could dispatch any of the beings that walked the Earth now—the "trash vampires and their dogs," as his father had liked to call them—but he knew he was no match for the No Life King: the original monster. There would be no way of stopping him.

Yes, D knew what would happen if his father ever freely walked the Earth again. The last shreds of his mind would unravel. He would search for a replacement for Integral in every human woman that bore the least bit of a resemblance to her, and when he saw they were but cheap imitations, he would destroy them. He would go on like that for a few years, possibly even a century until it became unbearable. And at that point, with no one to hold him back, the No Life King would surely destroy the world.

D knew how his father's mind worked. After all, he was half monster himself. And he also knew that what his father said was true. If the time ever did come, D could not destroy him. All he could do was continue to cage the monster.

D bowed to the image of his mother. Whether that day ever came or not, all he could do until then was continue to exterminate the descendents of the FREAKS; continue following Integral's final order.

Search and Destroy.

D left the painting and the sad corridor where the No Life King chose to entomb himself. He strengthened the wards surrounding the phantom compound and walked away, leaving the out-of-place building and its inhabitant to another century of brooding.

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**Post Script Author's Notes**: I want to say that I'm aware that in the Hellsing universe (at least the manga and the oav) only virgins can be turned into vampires. I'm still not sure how it happens in the VHD universe, but I'm assuming that if a vampire really wants to turn a non-virgin into a vampire, there's probably a way, such as drinking the vampire's blood, or infusing it directly into the victim's bloodstream._


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